For the most authentic experience, you want to use the controllers for the consoles that you’re emulating. Ideally, you want a decently-strong PC and suitable controllers. We’ll dive into more detail on these emulators when we get to them.įor now, let’s talk about what you’ll need… What should I have before emulating games? Many of the emulators on this list trend closer to high-level emulation, but a few of the cores in RetroArch are actually low-level emulation of older consoles. High-level emulators sacrifice accuracy for higher performance, while low-level emulators sacrifice performance for cutting-edge accuracy. An NES emulator is imitating, or “emulating”, an actual NES. While emulators exist for all kinds of hardware configurations and operating systems, the gaming console variants are by far the most popular.Īn emulator essentially serves as a virtual version of whatever console its imitating.

When people speak about emulators, they’re usually referring to game console emulators, like the ones we’ll be discussing today. Today, we’re going to cover the most cutting-edge emulation experiences available on the PC platform, and all you need to know about them. Over the course of the past few decades, emulators on PC have skyrocketed in popularity.